Re: How can I make Erasmatron open source?

[Chris Crawford <chriscrawford@wave.net>]

Brandon, your suggestions are pretty much what I'm attempting to do. I am
now working on a new Balance of Power using the Erasmatron, and I hope that
it will dramatically demonstrate the power of the technology.

Chris

> From: "Brandon J. Van Every" <vanevery@3DProgrammer.com>
> Reply-To: idrama@flutterby.com
> Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2001 15:28:41 -0500
> To: <idrama@flutterby.com>
> Subject: Re: How can I make Erasmatron open source?
> 
>> 2. If I did so, would that be enough to kickstart this whole floundering
>> interactive storytelling effort? (Assuming, of course, that you agree that
>> interactive storytelling is floundering.)
> 
> rec.arts.int-fiction is the only Internet community I'm aware of that
> produces a lot of IF work.  They have IF contests multiple times a year and
> see themselves as advancers of the art and craft of IF.  At this point in
> history their tools are free and open source, so it is unlikely that they'll
> be interested in tools that aren't.  It wasn't always so, in the past some
> of the tools were shareware, but that's ancient history now.  The community
> has accepted that nobody's making any money off of text-based IF and
> nobody's gonna.  They're a bunch of artistic idealists / hobbyists.  They
> are rather effective at continuing to elevate the quality of amateur work,
> but strategically speaking, their work will never be relevant to commercial
> entertainment.  Text-based IF is a dead art that a few stalwarts are keeping
> alive.
> 
> The only way the Erasmatron will ever be commercially relevant is if it (1)
> ties itself to the production processes of mainstream commercial game
> titles - 3D graphics engines, AI, lotsa art, audio, etc. (2) manages to add
> value over what all those artists, programmers, writers, and game designers
> can sell anyways.  I mean, in the games industry crap clearly sells.  As far
> as the corporations are concerned, there's no need for fancy technologies to
> move game product.
> 
> I think you're better off writing a killer game based on your Erasmatron
> code, thereby proving that the Erasmatron isn't theory, it's actually a cool
> title you can buy.  But frankly you're never going to survive as a
> middleware dealer without first proving to the world that your middleware is
> commercially valuable.  All of the other kinds of middleware - like 3D
> engines, physics engines, and now lately even AI engines - arose from
> features repeated in many games over and over again.  Such middleware meets
> a (corporate?) perceived market need to avoid re-inventing the wheel.  In
> the case of the Erasmatron you're not re-inventing the wheel, you're still
> trying to decide whether the wheel is even a good idea or not.
> 
> "King Of Dragon Pass" from www.a-sharp.com is the kind of game that I'd
> expect to benefit from an Erasmatron-style authoring engine.  KODP won an
> Independent Games Festival award for best artwork and has a small following
> on the Usenet groups it seems, but I doubt its author David Dunham would
> describe it as a profit runaway.  Rather, as an indie he got the title done
> and maybe he's getting some pocketmoney for it.  Note also that KODP didn't
> need any particular authoring environment to do what it did, it simply used
> an off-the-shelf multimedia authoring environment.  I'd just expect
> KODP-style authorship to benefit from the Erasmatron.  There's not a lot of
> that kind of authorship out there, most commercial games are pretty shallow.
> Which is why KODP was an indie title not a mainstream title.
> 
> So... envision the game that the Erasmatron would best implement.  Make it,
> sell it, find a way to avoid the Brick & Mortar Retail problem like all us
> other indies are trying to do.  Upon financial success proceed to the next
> stage.
> 
> 
> Cheers,
> Brandon Van Every
> 
>